How do we acquire so much crap?

For heaven's sake, it's downright ridiculous. We're clearing out the house since we're moving (sort of a two step thing, with us ending up overseas), and it's amazing how much "stuff" manages to find its way to our home. Spent the past few weeks selling, donating, freecycling everything in sight, and still a pile left to go.

Those of you who haven't bought a house yet, when you do, just say NO to buying things. I REALLY didn't need three sets of speakers, three separate video game systems, or 20 SLRs...

haha wait until you move again and again !! This is our third house. The rule of thumb is if a box has not been unpacked in 6 months it is not longer required and should be donated , thrown out.

We of course have never followed this rule and have boxes stored away that may have been sealed since the first move !!

Luckliy my wife is pretty good at letting things go - me I am a huge packrat and would never thorw anything away - For example it was only a few years ago my wife convinced to let go of my Assembler book (computer language) that I have not used since 1985 haha.

You're preaching to the choir. I just took a week off to clean up the house and make room for the baby to come. Towards the end of the week, I was getting real pissed as I heard my wife's voice echoing in my head - "We don't have anything." This as I constantly tripped over junk. It's going to take three more weeks to get to what I consider uncluttered. Good luck overseas!

I'm with ya...just filled two 10 yard roll-offs (dumpsters) during a basement remodel. The carpet and padding took up about half of one roll-off. The rest was just junk. The old computers went to the recycling center and the rest just had to go.

It definitely opened my eyes to what really needs to be purchased in the future and having a better plan on what to do with things when they're no longer useful to us. While it's not feasible to recycle everything, every avenue should be explored before it gets shipped off to the landfill.

My wife was leaving the house the other morning and said, "I'm going to stop by Wal-Mart and buy one of those...." My head about exploded...It's starting all over!

I can understand totally. When my husband was in the Navy, we moved every 3 years. Every 3 years we had a major cleaning out, yard sale, freecycle, Goodwill donation, etc. Here we are again with a house full of junk and my husband wants to finder a bigger place.... you know, so we can clean out and collect more junk....

Last time we moved (Seattle to San Diego) I went a bit crazy with the downsizing. We shipped a few boxes of small personal things that meant something ahead of time. Sold, gave away, threw away, or burned almost everything else in the house. When it came time to move we put the cat, a bag of clothes for each of us, and my old Martin guitar in the old VW Bug and hit the highways. Took our time visiting old friends along the way and cruising the coast.

It felt so good. In a month's time we went from a 3 bedroom house and garage full of material junk down to what would fit in the bug and a few boxes. It was like all this weight off our shoulders. I didn't want to stop driving when we got here...

Granted we have had to buy a lot of new basic houseware type of things as we need them - but we are a lot more cautious about "stocking up" on material goods now. I finally understand the whole retire and drive around in an RV thing now.

The rule of thumb is if a box has not been unpacked in 6 months it is not longer required and should be donated , thrown out.

Dave - I like that rule! Just last fall I finally went through our back porch, which was our "dumping" spot for all the boxes of stuff from our apartment we didn't know what to do with...

Only problem is, we moved into this house in 2002. 6 years those boxes stayed, and when I started rummaging through them, my wife starts with "oh, save those clothes and put them in our closet. Save those. Save that. *argh* and I thought *I* was the packrat!

Thankfully I whittled it down to two small grocery bags of clothes to save for her. (she didn't notice I gave away all the other stuff that she wanted to "save")